Many types of business logic are implemented by enterprise software applications. For example, customer relationship management (CRM) applications often implement business logic to perform price quotations and order capture for customers. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems often comprise enterprise applications that are used to integrate management information from multiple different functions within an organization. Due to extensive usage by many organizations, these enterprise applications and their associated computing systems often become some of the most over-burdened and most-often used applications within the organization. As a result, it is not uncommon for these enterprise applications to sometimes suffer from availability and performance problems.
Improved analysis and user-controllable diagnostics configuration modules are needed so as to identify and address performance problems with many types of systems and software. Using legacy tools, developers, diagnostic engineers, and IT administrators are forced to spend a significant amount of time merely reproducing a reported problem—even before diagnosing the root cause of the problem.
Conventional tools are typically only available to be used by a special class of users on the system such developers, diagnostic engineers, IT administrators, and database administrators (DBAs). One reason for restricted access to legacy tools is because they tend to demand a high degree of technical skill, consume a significant amount of time to set up, and demand significant system resources. The manpower usage and system performance degradation involved in using legacy tools is very costly. As a result, ordinary users (e.g., users other than developers, diagnostic engineers, IT administrators, and DBAs) are not typically provided with sufficient access to tools to configure and invoke diagnostics and logging.
Unfortunately, problems observed by normal users (e.g., during normal production operation of the applications) might not be easy to reproduce by developers, diagnostic engineers, etc. Waiting for an administrator to start diagnostics/logging instead of allowing users to have that capability creates barriers to effective diagnosis of problems in the system, and can severely impact the organization, its businesses and its processing systems. Techniques are needed to facilitate user configuration of instrumentation, logging, and to facilitate user-directed problem reproduction, resolution and auto-correction.
None of the aforementioned legacy approaches achieve the capabilities of the herein-disclosed techniques for user-directed diagnostics and auto-correction. Therefore, there is a need for improvements.